Taking Apollo and Dionysus as aesthetic symbols, Nietzsche explored the dialectic spirit state: dreaming and intoxicating, illusion and ego. The space's name - Blazing Night, consisting of contrasting imagery. Therefore, we take the dialectic spirits as a spatial metaphor from the perspective of time.
Blazing Night is based on a compound model of a cafe by day/a bar by night to illustrate the vision of interacting with the future. Therefore, using time as a design concept, we transform the complex commercial format into an immersive emotional experience.
The light gives us the basic perception of time. Taking the variation of time as a design idea, we deploy visual languages to compose a flowing spatial narrative: as day turns to night, the cafe turns into the bar, light and color changing accordingly, and the passage of time is presented visually.
Step into the entrance and encounter with the center of the space story—a round bar counter.The space is divided into three zones (up, middle, and down) with the distinct functions of a bar, a platform, and a cafe. Meanwhile, it brings a sense of time movement.
The rectangle installation hanging above the bar is both the inspiration of time and the prediction of the story. In the smoke, the red spotlight beam begins the molecule-movement of time. Two light trails are moving at different speeds, crossing the structure and overlapping, which metaphorically represents the dialectic and integration of two time lines in different dimension, calling the enthusiasm of space.
Up to the second floor, the bar, based on the concept of a store within a store, keeps the independence of space as well as produces a sequential space.
Time is both an illusion of color and light and a layered texture in reality. We use the modernist approach to deconstruct the instant moment, by means of dislocating, inverting, overlapping, and collaging, echoing the forms of cups and cities. Through contrasting and mixing, a free narrative is constructed by the transformation and combination of materials and forms, such as the ceiling covered with mirrors and wood panels, the custom geometric tables, chairs, and lightings.
The innermost area is in Old London style. The warm tone, wood texture, and white leather sofa show a harmony of function and emotion.
Blazing Night is both the creation and the re-creation of time. Like the start point and the terminal point, they are integrated as one at the moment and eternally. The blazing fantasy is the future and the prediction, carrying the consciousness of freedom and releasing the experience of spirit. Moving in this dialectical circle, coffee and wine, day and night, brightness and darkness, reality and dream, the utopian and the anti-utopian, all coexist under the dome of time narrative.
